In his speeches at the Russian Geographical Society (traditionally published with his forewords in a preface) Dal opposes the "illiterate" distortion of words in vulgar parlance.

However he distinguishes between these distortions and regional dialectical variations, which he collected meticulously over decades of travel from European Russia to Siberia.

In 1903, linguist Baudouin de Courtenay insisted as editor of the third edition on including new and obscene words (in total around 20,000).

The fifth edition (1935) was supported by Joseph Stalin and had a high cultural significance, since it was printed in the old "spelling" (repealed in 1918), thus providing continuity in the perception of pre-revolutionary literature by new generations.

However, this was not an exact reproduction of an original: derivatives of the root жид (jew) were removed from page 541 of volume 1.